ALARA Monograph 3 Donors as stakeholders in Community-Based Participatory Action Research

While the Community-Based Participatory Action Research (CBPAR) literature is

extensive, it does not adequately explore the donor-participant relationship. In this monograph,

we argue that the future of CBPAR can be strengthened if donor roles as participants in this form

of research and action can be better elucidated, community participants and academic partners

can be more deliberate in their decisions to pursue external funding and include donors as

partners in their work, and thereby make the potential of the donor-participant relationship and

its consequences explicit for all stakeholders. We argue that these considerations ensure better

leveraging of the potential power of CBPAR.

CBPAR shows significant promise as a form of research and action that may be

successfully leveraged in order to address significant social issues. However, this form of inquiry

requires adherence to particular sets of values and often deviates from the format followed by

more conventional research paradigms. CBPAR has significant resource requirements that often

fall outside of the capacity of communities. Thus while CBPAR may have significant promise as

a form of research that could help donors advance their social change aims, participants in this

form of inquiry and action often have a complicated relationship with the donor community. In

this monograph we argue that this relationship has not been sufficiently explored. We argue that

donors have a significant impact upon the kind of CBPAR partners may undertake as well as the

ways in which this kind of research and action is executed. Hence, we argue that the impact

donors have upon CBPAR should be further examined. We propose a typology of donors and

examine the impact of each donor type upon CBPAR.